Reading Bonhoeffer on "Community" with Acts 2.42-47

* Lecture notes prepared for a discussion on Dietrich Bonhoeffer's chapter on "Community" in Life Together for a course on Christian Vocation and Community Development

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It’s hard to imagine a more beautiful scene than the one described for us at the end of Acts 2: Spirit-birthed togetherness, harmony, devotion to the Scriptures, awe and wonder; gratitude, radical generosity, hospitality, prayer, the breaking of bread,  and heart-felt worship. For almost two thousand years, this scene has inspired churches throughout the ages to “get back to its roots”. Is this not ultimately what we all long for, to be in a community like this?

It feels strange to read this passage today in our time of social distancing and isolation, and in our age of increasing tribalism.

In my church, we flash Acts 2.42-47 up on the big screen each Sunday before the Prayers of the People as a reminder of why we structure our corporate gathering the way we do. We gather in devotion to the apostles teachings (Scripture reading and sermon), we share fellowship and break bread (Panera before the service, and the Lord’s Supper in the middle); we make ourselves and our resources available for one another and for those in need; we receive one another in our homes, especially in the summer on Wednesday nights; we praise God and give thanks with glad and generous hearts; and the Lord has given us favor and added to our numbers in ways that He has seen fit. We are not perfect, we still have room to grow, but I am encouraged by the life that God has birthed in our midst and the way in which we He has used our gathering, our togetherness,  to encourage us and to bless our community--even those outside of our congregation. 

Texts like Ephesians and Acts, which we have studied in this class, remind us that the life that we share together, the good that comes from our gathering together is not the result of us implementing some ideal, some vision or mission statement that we have come up with. Rather, it is all generated, it all has its source in the life and work of God. 

This is the main point in Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s insightful essay “Community”  in Life Together. He adamantly reminds us that Christian community is not an ideal that we try to live out or implement, rather it is a divine reality that we experience and that we are called to participate in. I think it is  vital to think about this when we read a text like Acts 2.42-47. It is easy to turn this text into a “wish dream”, a vision or an ideal of what we are supposed to look like. When this happens, the community that God is forming and shaping in and through us is in grave danger of being destroyed. 

Why? Because, as Bonhoeffer reminds us, we become demanders and accusers. We enter the community as demanders, requiring  that others live up to the ideal; and we accuse others when they do not; we act as if we, and our vision of community, are that which binds a community together and gives it life. We act as if the vision or ideal itself is what gives us life. And when the community fails to look the way we think it should, when it fails to uphold the vision, we not only accuse our brothers and sisters, we also accuse God. 

This is particularly problematic for pastors and elders, who can often be found complaining about a congregation which doesn’t seem to live up to the ideal. A congregation has not been entrusted to leaders of the church in order that they should become its accuser. It’s here that church leaders should realize that the “wish dream” has become an idol; they should repent; and daily receive the gift of fellowship that God has provided. Gratitude is our foundational posture. 

Christian community, Bonhoeffer argues, is threatened most when we confuse falling in love with the idea or vision of community (such as what can be seen in Acts 2.42-47) with the God-enabled task of  loving the people God has called to our gathering in all its particularities and challenges. “He who loves his dream of community more than the Christian community itself becomes a destroyer of the latter, even though his personal intentions may be ever so honest and sacrificial (pg. 27)”. 

We enter our fellowship, then, not as demanders but as thankful recipients. For “Christian community is not an ideal which we must realize; it is rather a reality created by God in Christ in which we may participate (p.30)”.

Jesus reminds of this in his teaching in John 10.1-10: Beware of those who do not enter the sheepfold through the gate, Jesus warns. They are thieves and robbers. They kill  and destroy. Jesus is the door, the gate, the way into community, into true fellowship. Anyone, whether it is a pastor, an elder, a deacon, or a well-meaning, zealous  church member, who seeks to enter into the community and does not do so through the gate, through Jesus, ultimately steals and destroys. 

A true, authentic community is not made of those who get the vision and seek to implement it; rather it is made of sheep who know and hear the voice of the Shepherd. They follow His lead. The follow behind Him. They have a foundational posture of hearing and obeying. They also recognize the voice of a stranger. And when they follow Jesus, He leads them to find pasture, rest and refreshment, provision and sustenance. For this Shepherd has come to give life abundantly. But that life is only found in listening and following, it  is only found by entering through the gate of Jesus. 

And what does it look like to hear the Shepherd’s voice, to follow Him to the pasture He has prepared for us? First Peter 2.19-25 outlines what this looks like. It is a life of faithful obedience that can often look like suffering and failure in this world characterized by rebellion, darkness, and unbelief. Jesus, Peter says, left us an example to follow, footsteps to walk in: when he was reviled, he did not revile in return; when he suffered, he did not threaten. Instead, he continually entrusted himself to the one who judges justly. Jesus modeled for us a life characterized by constant listening, attentiveness to God’s will in all its particularities and circumstances. To follow Jesus is to participate in His life of faithfulness, a life that looks like what He taught on the Sermon on the Mount--a life of enemy love, turning the other cheek, a life of entrusting God with retribution and justice when we are wronged because of our allegiance to God and His ways. 

But how are we enabled to live such a life? In and through Jesus, the gate. For he bore our sins in his body on a tree; he absorbed our wrong-doing, our evil, taking it out of circulation. He has healed us, and returned us to His fold, we who were straying. We have been liberated from the futile ways of life we have inherited, and are now freed to live a life of righteousness, a life that looks like the faithfulness of Jesus by the sanctifying work of the Spirit (1 Pet 1.2). 

This is and will always be the only foundation of our community. Jesus has not given us a vision to follow. Rather, he has created, generated a new reality that we share in. By the regenerating power of the Spirit and through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, we are incorporated into the life of God. God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, is intimately engaged in sharing with us His life as we share it with others. When we share in this koinonia with God, this divine reality, we experience hospitality, generosity, grace, forgiveness. We receive the benefits of the Good Shepherd’s provision, guidance, and protection , His green pastures, his still waters, His leading that shows His name to be great, His restoration and correction,  even in the midst of our valleys the shadow of death (Psalm 23). And we bring all of this to our corporate gathering--this life that we have experienced in God. And we find this kind of life from others in our gathering. This life that we receive from divine hospitality and generosity is what generates something that looks like Acts 2.42-47. We are devoted, generous, hospitable, faithful, grateful--not of our own doing, not because we are implementing a vision--but because this is what we have experienced as we entered through the gate, Jesus. 

And so, when we gather, Jesus, the Good Shepherd,  stands between each of us, the lover and those that he loves. We do not know in advance what love of others means on the basis of some generic idea of love; rather Christ, the Shepherd, whose voice we recognize and follow, tells us who to love, and how to love them (adapted from p. 35). 

Perhaps we can take advantage of some of this isolation we are experiencing to embrace and absorb God’s hospitality and generosity in our lives--so that we can share that with others; so that we can experience God’s love from one another. For, every act of solitude before God, every act of listening to and hearing God’s voice, every act of experiencing and receiving God’s hospitality and generosity, His love,  is also an act of service to the community. We are the body of Christ. Every member serves the body by being alone in meditation, listening to the Word and responding accordingly. Aloneness brings blessings, strength, clarity, peace, and healing to the community. 

For this we have been called together; for this reason we must continue to diligently seek ways of gathering together. God loves us by means of us sharing with one another what we have received from God. God loves us by means of us loving one another as we are directed to do so. So, let us reap a harvest for which we did not labor. Let us enter into the labor of God (John 4.38). 

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God Hates Visionary Dreaming?

“God hates visionary dreaming!” These are some of the most penetrating and disorienting words that I have ever read about Christian ministry. They were penned by German pastor, theologian, and seminary professor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, whose courageous resistance against Hitler’s tyranny resulted in imprisonment and execution in 1945.

 What do you mean “God hates visionary dreaming”? This went against everything that I learned in my ministry classes in seminary, against everything that I had read from church leadership experts. It contradicted the collective wisdom of all the workshops that offered me promising strategies for increasing my numbers. According to the church growth sages, what Christian communities are lacking more than anything else is a compelling vision that will attract people and inspire them to action: “we need more visionary dreamers,” they would say.

Bonhoeffer begged to differ: “God hates visionary dreaming!”

So why is Bonhoeffer so convinced that God opposes, what he called, “wish dreams”? His rationale might be the kind of disorienting wisdom that we need in our day and age where visions and strategies so often replace the foundational and abiding work that God has promised to do on our behalf.   

In an essay entitled “Community” in his classic Life Together, Bonhoeffer explains that “wish dreams” (or “visionary dreaming”) do not actually deliver what they promise: instead, they destroy genuine Christian fellowship:  “Every human wish dream that is injected into the Christian community is a hindrance to genuine community and must be banished if genuine community is to survive.”

Why do “wish dreams” destroy Christian community? Bonhoeffer argues that visionary dreaming fosters in us a love for our ideal of community, our “vision” or our “wish dream” of what church should be like more than it fosters love for the actual Christian community to which we have been called. He goes on underscore that when we impose our visionary dreams upon a Christian community, we become demanders and accusers. We demand that our vision, our ideal of Christian community be realized by God and by others; and we act as if authentic Christian fellowship holds together because of our vision. And when things do not go as they were envisioned, the visionary dreamer turns against God and others, accusing them all of failing to do their part. When the ideal picture of Christian community is destroyed, the visionary dreamer stands adamantly against all those who failed to realize the dream. This, it is not hard to see, actually destroys community!

The inevitable result of visionary dreaming, Bonhoeffer argues, is disillusionment. But even this, he says, is a gift from God if we receive as such!  “Only that fellowship which faces disillusionment, with all its unhappy and ugly aspects, begins to be what it should be in God’s sight…The sooner this shock of disillusionment comes to an individual and to a community the better for both.” Bonhoeffer urges us to let disillusionment teach us, heal us of our illness. For the fact of the matter is that God has already laid the foundation for our fellowship, a foundation established long before any of us entered into common life together.

Counterintuitively, disillusionment can actually lead us to genuine Christian community, because it enables us to enter into common life together not as demanders and accusers, but rather as recipients of God’s grace and forgiveness in and through Jesus Christ. It enables us to enter into common life together with gratitude, thanking God for what we have (rather than complaining to God for what we do not have).  For disillusionment reminds us that genuine Christian fellowship is not an ideal which we must realize; rather it is a reality created by God in Christ into which we are invited to participate.

            I draw attention to Bonhoeffer’s reflection on Christian community, not to be critical of the church and her leaders. Rather, my hope is that in the midst of all of the temptations these days to replace God with strategic plans and compelling visions, we might avoid becoming demanders and accusers of God, and thus inadvertently destroy the very thing we were hoping to build.